First, you would have to understand what evidence is, and is not. From the evidence of your incredibly long and incredibly ignorant post, you don't.

Here's a hint: going on and on and on like you do is a symptom of being a crank in most people's eyes.

Speaking of cranks;

It seems eseedhouse you have all kinds of ideas about what moderators should and shouldn't do. Luckily, they have nothing to do with the rules of this forum. If you would like to learn more about the house where you are a guest, please feel free to ask in a private message or separate thread, and one of us will be happy to explain how we run things.

If you read a little bit more closely you would realize that the various voices on the thread are advocating all kinds of positions. I myself stated earlier that I felt a moral obligation to get a flue shot, not unlike your own position. Somehow I managed to make my case without pissing off everyone I was talking to. It isn't your opinions that make people dislike debating with you, it is your condescending toneThat glass house you live in must be awfully drafty.

It seems eseedhouse you have all kinds of ideas about what moderators should and shouldn't do. Luckily, they have nothing to do with the rules of this forum. If you would like to learn more about the house where you are a guest, please feel free to ask in a private message or separate thread, and one of us will be happy to explain how we run things.

If you read a little bit more closely you would realize that the various voices on the thread are advocating all kinds of positions. I myself stated earlier that I felt a moral obligation to get a flue shot, not unlike your own position. Somehow I managed to make my case without pissing off everyone I was talking to. It isn't your opinions that make people dislike debating with you, it is your condescending toneThat glass house you live in must be awfully drafty.

Thankyou for your kind words, which encourage me no end. I see that my methods are working just fine and so I will continue with them.

The sad thing is that Rex probably never read the emails or code, and is relying on snippets he heard on blogs. Taken out of context anything can be spun the wrong way, particularly when taken from private emails, notes, or README files. Andrew Sullivan's correspondent sums it up nicely

Sure much of this looks sketchy to an outsider, but I guarantee you that if you dug through the e-mails of any large organization in a similar manner you'd find all manner of seemingly sketchy things. It's a side effect of the casual language we use in e-mails and assumptions of the context that goes into them. That doesn't mean they were hiding something, it just means they were doing their job like everybody else in this world.

The idea that there is massive groupthink may have some truth to it, but I thoroughly agree with the following.

...as experiments are repeated and hypotheses are tested in new contexts, scientific communities reach a consensus -- until a result comes along that overturns it. By the way, there is no better way to establish your reputation as a scientist than overturning a consensus. It's true that it's not easily done, but any scientist would be thrilled to do it.

Thats why in the Lyman et al example I used above, the authors were pleased to publish something that showed cooling in the ocean - it was so unexpected. They were working for NOAA, they weren't cranks, they just thought they had an exciting result that went against the consensus. The idea that there aren't people out there testing the existing data is simply untrue - if the warming over the last 100 years were not robust, the scientific community would know about it.

Thank you jklymak!
With two degrees in geography, I can remember the 'culture' of climate change studies quite clearly.

The discipline is loaded with countermeasures to conspiracy. Once you get past your BA, you make your bread and butter in tearing other people's arguments apart. That's how science advances. The null hypothesis has as much elbow room as whatever your hypothesis might be. You advance by defeating the findings of your peers. Ever scientific experiment must be able to be duplicated with the same results each time. To get to a point of consensus, they've torn at each other like caged savages. It's not gentle. It's not even friendly a lot of the time. One day, someone may convince me that global climate change is not as bad a thing as as I thought it might be. No one will ever convince me that science is conspiring to bring forward one sided data.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

According to sources at the University of Victoria, two people claiming to be network computer technicians presented themselves at the headquarters of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis and tried to gain access to the data servers. When challenged by an employee, the two individuals hastily left. The timing of this attempted break-in is very suspicious given that it occurred so closely on the heels of the release of hacked emails and data from a similar facility housed at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

The story was also verified by a UVIC spokesperson in an interview yesterday with the National Post.

"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

I'm quite happy with this course of events. As I've stated, I find it quite refreshing that people talk about climate change, and green technology etc., but most are not willing to do anything about it.

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate.

Chasing Iceis the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet.

How on Earth are we going to fight this apparently new scourge? Rainstorms bring floods in Toronto that cause electricity system blackouts, transit shutdowns and major financial havoc. Floods in Alberta do the same to the Calgary region. The instant reaction, in some circles, is to pin the blame on climate change and use the events as a launch pad for new calls for action on carbon emissions.

There are two reasons why this response to these dramatic weather events is mistaken. One is that the science does not support the claim that today’s local weather extremes are a function of man-made climate change. Even David Suzuki, one of the grandfathers of climate alarmism, concedes as much. “Can we say the recent flooding and extreme weather in Southern Alberta and B.C. were caused by global warming? Maybe not,” he wrote recently in response to the Alberta floods.

But it doesn’t matter whether you think killer weather is or is not caused by global warming. The more important question is what we do about it, and here is where the policy agenda has been hijacked. Instead of spending billions of dollars chasing carbon emission reductions at home and around the world, why not spend money making Toronto and other cities less vulnerable to floods, heat waves and other events. Read more

Know it all.Citified.ca is Victoria's most comprehensive research resource for new-build homes and commercial spaces.

When someone like David Suzuki says he's doubtful recent bizarro weather is linked solely to carbon emissions, you sit up and listen.

Well, you didn't quote Suzuki, you quoted some editorial writer. And one ignorant of Science, in my opinion.

No, the recent floods and extreme events do not "prove" global warming.

But they don't have to, because we've already measured "global warming" and we know for a fact it is happening. And we also know that an inevitable outcome of that warming is an increase in extreme weather events, both hot ones and cold ones.

So while the recent extreme events aren't proof on their own, or even in isolation particularly strong evidence for that matter, they are on the other hand perfectly consistent with global warming. And we can expect their occurances to multiply as the warming continues.

I'm not happy with the term "global warming" myself because the globe of the earth is 8000 miles in diameter and most of it is not warming. Just the surface bits where you and I and all life happens to be. Go down a few dozen miles and you will observe no recent warming. Measure the oceans and the air and you will find it unambiguously. So I prefer, for want of a better term, "biosphere warming". Too bad that's where you and I happen to live.

As for the idea that all we have to do is build stronger dams and seawalls and manage runoff better and stuff like that and not worry about the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, that is just innumeracy. We know enough to be able to conclude that the only way to economically deal with the problem is to stop dumping all that carbon into the atmosphere. Mitigation by any other method will be far, far more costly.

Nobody is arguing climate change isn't happening, it clearly is, but the issue is whether or not it's happening as a result of man-made carbon emissions for which we are being taxed or whether it's a natural process. Clearly for the trillions of dollars to be made by carbon credit pushers the issue boils down to alarmist science and plays on emotion where common sense has no business.

A leaked UN report even admits that solar activity is the likely culprit here, not carbon emissions. In this day and age the wool can be pulled over our eyes for only so long.

Know it all.Citified.ca is Victoria's most comprehensive research resource for new-build homes and commercial spaces.